


The Executive's Blight

by soysaucevictim



Series: Mental Worlds [1]
Category: Ask Blog - Fandom, Psychonauts
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 05:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13711218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soysaucevictim/pseuds/soysaucevictim
Summary: A thought experiment at visualizing Inky’s mind, a la Psychonauts.





	The Executive's Blight

     What would Inkler’s mind look like, I wonder.

     Well, besides the very literal image of lump of gray mater wrapped up in pulsating, blackened vasculature. (Which is delightful imagery in of itself, but I digress.)

     I mean, if you could just dive right in there and explore his mental world of sorts…

—

     Upon entry, you find yourself in the well lit hallways of his factory. Things appear normal, orderly, but all the angles are a bit… off.  Like if the designer wasn’t intent on being exacting. Glowing figments of colorful truffula tree paintings and advertising posters deck the walls. All being outdated caricatures of him, though. For appearances, you know.

     As you wander deeper, you notice the thneed counter mounted on the wall. But the counter’s frozen at 3,980,000. The poster underneath, though. That proud little piece of graphic design that had “Too Big To Fail” written on it, was obscured. It was smeared with a drippy blackness covering up the last word.

     Looking further, you notice the hall start to get very crooked. And the colors began to drain from the vibrant wallpaper and carpet.

     It would be easy to lose track of time, but eventually you reach the end of the hallway.  There was a door to your side. It was supposed to be his office and its handles were covered in frantic, inky hand prints. A messy motif that became more and more apparent at this point in the mental realm.

     Inside was a corporate office in disarray. There were more illusions inside of scattered forms and more askew paintings on the walls. And those walls perpetually oozed of the dark and thick substance that gave him his nom de plume.  Flowing from a ceiling so high, that all you could see was more black.

      And then, you hear rattling coming from behind the ostentatious desk chair. Moving toward the noise, you see a vault and it carried in it some of his memories. Opening it reveals to you various images of the man grappling with his curse. Of how he had to retreat from public exposure, the pain and mortification that followed his changes, of how he learned to suck it up when it was clear his own mother would have none of it.

     There’s more to see as you walk toward the balcony. Past the railing was the sweeping imagery of the valley at its most fertile. But as you walk closer, the image flickered between that and the same scene in a state of ruin. As you touch the railing, it gives way to a portal deeper inside.

     When you pass through, things have become all the more surreal. There was some echoes of the valley, as there were the truffulas springing up here and there, from lush grass, except that some of the colors appearing blanched and spotty. But amongst them were giant ink pens planted adjacent. You can find various other crudely rendered figments of bar-ba-loots and swomee swans and their ilk making circuits around the land.

     Not much longer until you come up to the river. Only it wasn’t flowing with water, but ink. You follow along it upstream to explore further.  There were more massive pens, brushes, and then _knives_ stabbing the arid ground than there were trees. You could also see variously sized bottles of ink dot the landscape, ink bottles and smokestacks.

     And the figments were not of wildlife but of pumpkins, lambs, stained bowties, crowns, and various pastries (some of which have been shaped into turtles). Some of these objects were hidden behind shimmering cobwebs and the dense forest of no-longer-trees, the things he’d rather leave alone to gather dust. Unable to penetrate them, you continue on.

     The horizon began to twist and darken; an ominous reverberation to the hallway you travelled in earlier.

     Going even further upstream, the ground was bleached and blotted with the mess of spilled bottles. Figments became gears and tangled thneeds as you came to the end of the line. It was the factory. Only not. It was a terrifyingly huge monster, with claws digging into the ground, belching out it’s jagged maw smoke and sludge, sludge that ran off into the river of ink that you followed up toward it. It barely even looked human, obscured in haze. It breathed heavily, with pained groaning and angry growling, loud and low enough to make you feel viscerally uneasy upon approach.

     You are allowed only the briefest glimpse of what was behind the smog before you are booted out of the mental world into the physical realm.

 

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks for the creators of the characters derived and my beta readers - Louise, Glam, and Robert.
> 
> Originally posted [here](http://soysaucevictim.tumblr.com/post/53828295063/the-executives-blight).


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